This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

We review studies on monetary transmission in the EU countries using the VAR approach and analyse why they often lead to divergent outcomes. Firstly, we estimate 43 VAR models across ten EU countries and compare the robustness of the ranking of the magnitudes of the price and output responses....